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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22365214">Halfway through the wood</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/meredyd/pseuds/meredyd'>meredyd</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars Sequel Trilogy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Rey is Not a Palpatine</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-01-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-01-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 11:07:07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,223</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22365214</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/meredyd/pseuds/meredyd</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Each night, she waits out the cool air and exits a home that doesn’t belong to her and waits for ghosts that never appear. Each time, she imagines it will get easier, as easy as it once had been, to build a long safe life made only of this. </p><p>Rey on Tatooine.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Finn/Rey (Star Wars), Leia Organa &amp; Rey, Poe Dameron &amp; Rey</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Halfway through the wood</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The little girl leans down and asks her questions to BB-8 first, as if she’s shy of looking at another person but not of talking. Rey doesn’t recognize most of the fruit her mother is buying - she and Finn never got that far on their tour of what nobody else considered delicacies - but there’s something bright, pink, and covered in little turquoise spikes that smells tangy and sharp, and finally the girl takes two out of the basket and hands one to Rey. Their eyes meet only for an uncomfortable second. </p><p>Rey says, trying to be quiet, her voice feels rough and strange to hear speaking to someone else, “He’s pleased to meet you.” BB-8 runs a circle around her. </p><p>The girl’s face turns as pink as the fruit in delight, which tastes nothing how Rey thought it would. It’s too sweet instead. </p><p>“MamaandIliveovertherewheredoyoulive?” She asks so quickly Rey hardly catches it, looking proud of herself, pointing to the shadow outline of rounded houses in the middle distance. </p><p>The fruit sticks in her throat now, the sweetness is calcifying.</p><p>“I—I live far away from here. It’s very green, and very beautiful. My family is there.”</p><p>“Whyaren’t you withthem?” The girl asks, but seems unconcerned when Rey doesn’t answer her. </p><p>	◆	</p><p>She didn’t say goodbye before leaving, and try as she might Rey can’t dredge up the right amount of guilt for it. In the sleepy haze after celebration, nobody saw her go. She packed and unpacked the sabers three times before leaving them, too. It wasn’t her right to decide where one more thing got buried. </p><p>Even so she knows Finn felt it, and that hurried her, the thought of his wide brown eyes near tears. He knew her, and awake under the night sky it was impossible to ignore the bald truth of it at last, which was the exact problem.</p><p>Each night, Rey waits out the cool air and exits a home that doesn’t belong to her and waits for ghosts that never appear. Each time, she imagines it will get easier, as easy as it once had been, to build a long safe life made only of this. </p><p>	◆	</p><p>You die from thirst before you die from starvation. It’s an obvious and practical fact, and what once made Rey loneliest was having lived it. She remembers, although the times are now so far past, living it more than once. The way dryness has a taste there aren’t any words for, a numb curdled feeling of the mouth. The moments where the world blurred in outline and she thought that maybe it was over but not with any kind of fear.</p><p>It’s always the same, waking up in the desert, no matter how many suns there might be. And the sense of disorientation. Rey doesn’t know for a minute or two every morning where she is and can’t form it until BB-8 starts beeping like an alarm. Same heat, orange and flat and endless.</p><p>There is something else inside her now, something hollow that doesn’t want for sustenance or arrivals. </p><p>	◆	</p><p>Once long ago around the campfire Poe told her about the tree Master Luke had given his parents, the way it pulsed and grew around the Force. How it was the first place he went whenever he was away, the place on the ground that felt most like the stars but let him know he had returned. He spoke of it with reverence, serious for once with her, words heavy with love and grief.</p><p>But - Rey wanted to ask with an unfamiliar panic, wanted to climb into his story and sit beside him as a child herself too and ask - but that’s not all the Force is. Aren’t you afraid the tree will rot? Aren’t you afraid you’ll climb to the top one day and feel the warmth fade, aren’t you afraid we’ll fall? </p><p>	◆	</p><p>The things Rey will never speak of, under the sand with the past: the hot rush of her breath catching in her chest when she wakes up and remembers how she pulled away just before Ben died, wondering and never knowing if he’d lean forward, would kiss her. How it felt to know Finn’s secret, before he told her, a thing she would never take from another person. That she had no right to her losses or her wins, forever a scavenger, back in the same place again.</p><p>How it felt to hold something entirely new, something she had made, and watch it light a yellow arc through the red sky. To let what she’d always known flow through her and fill her up until it felt like it would choke her: </p><p>That if you became so good at waiting for answers a part of you enjoyed it, the part of you capable of the worst things. In that dry and empty space no one else would tell you the truth of it, that for all the voices inside of you, when the dust settled, you yourself were no one at all. </p><p>There was no great lineage but the people who had left you whose names and faces you would never really know. It hadn’t hurt when she knew for sure. When there was so much else to think about. Now, empty and silent, it did, and Rey lets herself cry for longer than she knew she could before pushing herself up from her knees, to try and enjoy her last binary sunset. </p><p>	◆	</p><p>Back then, she had asked Leia instead, who huffed out a sigh.</p><p>“Metaphors aren’t your strong suit, young lady. If you want a straight answer, I saw Poe tumble out of that tree at least four times in as many months.” </p><p>“Yes, General?”</p><p>“Two of those I almost let him hit the ground, but you’re catching me on a bad day,” Leia said, careful. Rey had seen then, just how tired she was. “When I say you have a home here, I’m not rallying the troops. I’m giving you the honest truth, and I’ve lived enough lives to know how much that matters to people like us.”</p><p>Rey tried not to stare at her empty hands. Every muscle in her body ached to run until she forgot.  </p><p>“But I also know people like us have to find things out for ourselves. You’re going to do what you want no matter what I tell you, though I hope you’ll still take it to heart. Ask anyone but me, Rey, I’m never wrong.”</p><p>	◆	</p><p>The weight of the weeks she’s spent not quite healing crash on her at once in the green dampness. Each bone and ligament thrums back to life together, and all of it seems to hurt in a way it didn’t before. The world is lush with so much color and so much sound, and the half second before she’s in Finn’s arms may not have ever existed. </p><p>Rey thinks of falling. She thinks of all the ways to fall, every permutation of the possibility a voice in her mind that won’t leave her. Finn’s gripping her too tight as she slackens in his arms, his head buried against her as he whispers something she can’t hear but can feel. The desert has been so quiet, but then - that’s the noise. Her toes curl into the bruised ground. All around her, she realizes, is water.</p>
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